Quebec charter reflects values of small-minded separatists

If the goal of the Parti Quebecois’s new secular charter was to unite Quebecers in defence of shared values, the first few days can’t be encouraging.

The business community is unenthusiastic. The head of the Montreal board of trade said that, until the PQ made it into an issue, no one in the Montreal business community had expressed any concern. Quebec has a hard enough time attracting skilled immigrants, he added, and the aura of intolerance contained in the charter isn’t likely to help.

Montreal municipal leaders issued a united condemnation, arguing the charter threatens, rather than protects, the harmony that has been the norm among the city’s diverse cultural mix.

“Most of our employees aren’t Jewish or Muslim but, if they are, their religion is their business,” Bill Steinberg, the mayor of Hampstead, a Montreal suburb, told The Gazette. “The state has no place limiting a person’s job prospects based on their faith. This is tyranny of the majority, plain and simple.”

The island’s 15 municipal mayors say they’ll opt out of the charter if it is put into effect. And the Bloc Quebecois, the PQ’s federal allies, expelled one of its Members of Parliament after she denounced the charter. Maria Mourani, MP for the federal riding of Ahuntsic, wrote on her personal website, that the charter would result in “stigmatization and exclusion of certain communities, particularly some women.”

In response, Bloc leader Daniel Paillé said the comments “don’t reflect the position of the Bloc Québécois.”

Paille supports the charter, but might wish Premier Pauline Marois had found another issue to champion. With Mourani’s departure he’s down to just four MPs, a 20% decline for a party that has been hoping to rebuild, not deplete, its ranks.

The reaction in Montreal may be no more than the PQ expected. Its strength is in the overwhelmingly French-speaking areas outside the city, where there are fewest immigrants and thus the greatest ignorance about immigration. It’s easier to sow paranoia and xenophobia among voters who are unlikely to encounter a civil servant in a hijab in the first place. In Montreal, where experience with multiculturalism has demonstrated it’s no big deal, the PQ scare tactics don’t work as well.

So the fact that labour unions and French-speaking areas favour the charter indicates the immediate political goals of the PQ are being met: to cement its support among organized labour and pure-blood Quebecers. But it’s also reinvigorated the federal Liberals, handing leader Justin Trudeau an issue to hammer at as he goes up against New Democrat leader Thomas Mulcair in search of Quebec.

Both leaders have issued ringing declarations of opposition. Mulcair on Tuesday said the charter “has nothing to do with some high-sounding value” and “everything to do with the most base politics. It’s undignified and we’re going to fight it straight up.”

“We’re categorical in rejecting this approach. Human rights don’t have a best-before date, they’re not temporary and they’re not a popularity contest.

“To be told that a woman working in a daycare centre because she’s wearing a head scarf will lose her job is to us intolerable in our society.”

Trudeau said Wednesday Marois is”trying to play divisive identity politics because it seems to be the only thing that is able to distract from the serious economic challenges that we’re facing as a province and as a country.”

“As I have said since her Parti Québécois first announced this plan back in the 2012 election campaign, I categorically oppose it. Like our fellow Canadians elsewhere, Quebeckers are open, positive people. We believe in defending each other’s freedoms, not restricting them.”

A fight with Ottawa may be just what Marois wanted, but a fight that pits her against the province’s biggest city, the business community, many local politicians and even some separatists is hard to sell as a project promoting shared values and harmony. The PQ might be better to rename their charter to reflect its actual status, as a declaration of small-minded separatist values.